


and into the glorious future

by JPlash



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Apocalypse, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Apocalypse spoilers, F/M, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:57:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik’s arm is still pressed very awkwardly down the back of Charles’s chair, Erik bent slightly sideways to make up the height. “You’re avoiding the point. I’m not good for you, Charles.”</p><p>“Oh, I don’t know, old friend. I suspect you make me better by contrast. I have to keep hoping, just to irritate you.”</p><p>*</p><p>A missing scene of sorts from near the end of Apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and into the glorious future

They walk (and wheel) the tunnels under the house, check and recheck the foundations. It’s not that Charles isn’t profoundly grateful to Erik and Jean for rebuilding his house, their home; it’s that he’d feel rather more confident if either of them were an engineer, or an architect, or even a builder, rather than a retired Nazi-hunter and a school student. They talk while they walk, or they don’t, but when they do, it’s about the same things, future things, because most of their pasts are dead. Erik is leaving, probably soon; this is most of what they talk about, or move side-by-side in silence about. Raven is staying, and this is another thing. Moira is—well, here, at least right now, and that is what they talk about as they leave Cerebro, head toward the nearly finished training space that Erik calls an upgraded training space and Charles and Hank call the Danger Room (Raven just rolls her eyes and asks if it’s ready yet).

“I shouldn’t let her stay. She’s in love with me, and I’m not remotely deserving. Besides which, she belongs in Washington.”

Erik shrugs. “She knows you’ve demonstrated a total lack of respect for the integrity of her mind. If she still wants you, that’s her problem.”

“It’s not a lack of respect-,”

“You took her memories, Charles. You refused to take the memories of our enemies, yet checked hers for your convenience. It’s who you are, I’m not criticising. I’d kill you if you ever did it to me, but I know you wouldn’t.”

“This is exactly my point.” Charles bites his lip, sighs. “I obviously don’t deserve her at all. I’m probably not properly in love with her, really.”

Erik, kindly, does not dignify that with a response. “Moira can give you children. A family. You should have children, Charles.” He gestures as casually as Erik is ever able, at nothing and everything—at the school, presumably. “You’re clearly made for it.”

“Is that what you’ll do? Find a new start?”

Erik looks very tense for a moment, but he breathes out deep. “No. Raven said something, in Egypt, that-,” the hesitation is both very unlike Erik and thrillingly (guiltily) familiar, someone he hasn’t shown Charles in decades. “You’re family. You and Raven. Perhaps that’s all I’m supposed to have.”

They’re moving slowly now; Charles deliberately, Erik keeping his pace alongside. Charles shakes his head. “No, Erik. No, I don’t believe that any of this has ever been about what you should or shouldn’t have. I don’t believe in—fate? Like that. I don’t believe in a god like that. Nothing took your child because you’re not supposed to have one.”

“No, I know that. I don’t either.”

Charles raises an eyebrow, the smallest mental nudge, question not command. Erik hums a sort of groan. He’d rather not discuss this. He’d rather not discuss most things he’s ever discussed with Charles. “You’re less fragile, you and Raven, than any other family I can make. I’ve lost enough family. I’ve gone places, trying to avenge family, that have led me nowhere. They've taken my mother, my wife, and my daughter. I’ve failed again and again to protect them. I think it might be best that I stick with those strong enough to protect themselves.”

“Then stay.” Charles does not argue the rest, for now; knows he will still be arguing it in a decade and two and three.

A shake of the head, the hard edge of a smile.

“Stay with me, Erik.”

“You’re less fragile than most. But you’re a lot more fragile when I’m around.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

He’s around the chair, suddenly behind, and then Charles gasps in air, quiet and almost still, at Erik’s hand on his back, warm through his shirt: the brush of his palm and then three fingers, unerring, to the scar, to the place where sensation ends, Erik’s arm pressed between Charles’s shoulder blades and the chair.

“That’s not-,”

“You’d be outraged if your sister wanted to take someone back who’d so much as struck her. You’d never let him in the house.”

“I let _you_ in the house in the full knowledge that you sometimes have sex with my sister.”

Charles can feel Erik’s flinch at that; not physical, he has more control than that, but very much mental, emotional. “Not often. Not in twenty years.” Charles lets him squirm (invisibly—it takes more than this, these days, to shift the miasma of cool detachment) for a moment’s silence. Erik frowns. “As I recall, we both ended up feeling guilty, despite ourselves.” He sounds more confused by this than anything.

Charles breathes out on a very, very wry chuckle. “I will admit, I would far prefer it if my little sister never had sex with anyone, ever, past, present, or future. However,” because he loves Raven and Erik more than anyone in the world, and sometimes (often) he would love to throttle them both, “Ultimately, Erik, all I want is for you both to be…” a small shift of the head, the way Charles sometimes tends to talk with his eyebrows. “If you’re both alive, and fairly safe, and not presently killing anyone, then I’ll be happy. You can sleep with whomever you like.”

Erik’s arm is still very awkwardly pressed down the back of Charles’s chair, Erik bent slightly sideways to make up the height. “You’re avoiding the point. I’m not good for you, Charles.”

“Oh, I don’t know, old friend. I suspect you make me better by contrast. I have to keep hoping, just to irritate you.”

“You deserve someone who’ll take care of you.” He straightens, finally. “I left you in Cuba, I know you were angry with me for hurting you in ’73, I let him hurt you in Egypt, and I’ll do it again. You’ll never be first for me, not before the fight, you know that.”

“And you’ll never be first for me. Or second. Perhaps third or fourth.”

Erik actually snorts at that. “Somewhere down the list after all of humanity?”

“Not as individuals, but as a mass, certainly. I think the children are probably first, collectively, then maybe Raven, then the rest of the world, again collectively.” Erik makes a humming noise—the one Charles knows means he’s not really listening. He chuckles again anyway, mostly to himself. “I should probably have a better grasp of my priorities.”

“I am sorry.”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t know he meant to kill you. I know that’s not what matters to you. I know you’d rather have died than let him harness your power, but I—didn’t know he meant to kill you. I didn’t know that his plans for your powers involved taking your body.”

They watch each other, for a long moment—watch each other like they used to, before they knew each other so well.

“You have these persistent visions, don’t you, of dragging me along with you, surviving despite myself, into your new mutant utopias?”

“I’d rather not have to drag you.”

“You always will, Erik. I’ll never go willingly.”

And he nods, once. “I know.”

Moira goes back to Washington, thankfully of her own accord. She is in love with Charles, but she’s also a ranking CIA operative with a son and a technically-still-husband and forty-five years of her own life. Charles doesn’t disallow her from the house, but he doesn’t encourage her to visit. Erik’s right, he’d never take such liberties with Erik’s mind, and not out of fear of reprisal but because it would seem deeply, fundamentally wrong. Charles doesn’t understand why that difference is there, or even necessarily why it should matter _so_ much, but he understands that it does.

He has nightmares, sometimes, of he and Erik on the dais in the pyramid, Erik powerful and empty, and Charles the unwilling second king of the wasteland.

He calms his mind, when he wakes from these, and summons visions instead of he and Erik at the study window, the school grown to a sort of town, sprawling and thronging with with mutants and humans, working and learning and living, and Erik satisfied with their small domain, kings (or principals, at least) of their own contained paradise.

He calms his mind, when he wakes from the nightmares, and he summons more hopeful dreams but mostly, he trains his soldiers.

The next time Erik decides to drag him into some glorious future, Charles will be ready to fight.

**Author's Note:**

> So that Cherik conversation outside the Danger Room is super pleasing, but kind of doesn't really resolve some of the big character threads of the film...and I NEEDED RESOLUTION :P
> 
> (Seriously though, they leave Egypt, and then 'oh we're out of time, good, xmen founded, everyone's friends'...but at some point, at the less cinematically stunning end of the plot:  
> \- Charles and Hank and Raven must have resolved their conflicting visions for the school and the X-Men  
> \- Charles and Erik probably? resolved (or reeeeally didn't lol) the fact that Erik helped kidnap Charles for death by body invasion  
> \- Moira presumably had some reaction to the revelation (THANK YOU) that Charles casually completely fucked her over twenty years ago  
> \- Charles will have been alerted via the kids that his friend of ten years back, Wolverine, has been at Alkali Lake all that time and is now roaming  
> \- and presumably there was some sort of funeral for Alex, and a lot of trauma for Scott.)
> 
> So here, have my knee-jerk response XD
> 
> Yeah mostly I just have an unhealthy need to write Erik and Charles having uncomfortable conversations :P
> 
> (Also, I wrote this literally at 3:30am after the midnight screening and only gave it a quick edit today, so please tell me if things need attention :D)


End file.
